Change management is the art and science of getting people to adopt new ways of working. Effective organizational change management (OCM) helps overcome employee resistance and effectively manages the people side of change.
In practice, it looks like a mix of processes, tools and techniques to ensure that shifting to new ways of working – like embedding a new PMO or earned value management approach – is a success. It’s about making the change ‘stick’.
In other words, it’s fine to launch a new initiative now, but what will have happened in six months? Will people still be using the new systems and processes? Or will they have reverted back to the old ways of doing things because the change was ‘too hard’ or ‘not right for us’? You know what you want the answer to be, and change management is the tool to use to get that result.
Change management as a discipline has been around for a long time, and the benefits of OCM are clear. It ensures that the people side of adoption and implementation are addressed thoroughly, from sponsorship to new roles and responsibilities, dealing with internal politics to adequately training staff.
So what’s new?
Flexible change management
In the past, it has been possible to plan out a change management approach from the beginning of the project. Let’s say you are implementing Primavera P6 across the organization. You know what the outcome is going to be: everyone will be using Primavera for project scheduling and probably some other things. You can plan the change management activities. There will be engagement meetings, workshops, training sessions, project newsletters to keep users up-to-date with how things are going, a new page on the intranet with links to user guides… you get the picture.
However, many of the changes being led by PMOs today don’t fit into the model where you know what the end result will be. Consider launching a PMO for the first time. You might not know what the PMO will be doing when the initiative starts, because there’s a period of analysis and information gathering to find out what the most useful services will be. You might shift delivery models halfway through, or re-structure the business once it’s clear that it would be served by a different approach. Planning change management the ‘traditional’ way becomes much harder.
What this means for your PMO
Change management provision needs to become more flexible. What that means in practice is that people responsible for change management planning need to shift their mindset away from the detailed communication and training plans that might have been sufficient in the past, towards an agile approach.
How do you help people see the vision when you don’t even know where you’re going? Instead, look at ways to generate awareness of the status quo and how that is no longer fit for purpose. Consider how you can involve people in the process of progressively elaborating the change, designing as you go. Think about how to convince people to buy into something they can’t see and probably don’t understand yet (digital transformation programs, we’re looking at you).
You know we love to give practical suggestions as well as sharing ideas, so here are some thoughts on what steps you could take to make the most of this trend.
Make your metrics flexible
It’s good practice to develop change management plans and define metrics so you can analyze the success of your implementation. Take the time to think through what would be the most appropriate metrics and consider setting up a variety of measures to capture different aspects of the change. If the metrics need to change, change them.
Celebrate achievements
Make a point of celebrating what you’ve managed to do. In itself, celebrating change is a good way of building interest and engagement in a project. It’s also a way of recognizing the contribution of people who perhaps haven’t found it easy to engage with the changes.
Build in milestones specifically around opportunities to celebrate how far you have come.
Continuously improve
Effective change management relies on learning from what works and what doesn’t, analyzing the results and making changes to your approach as you move forward. Make the time to review what you are doing by building in feedback loops. Be prepared to shift quickly if you notice that the change management activities aren’t having the desired effect.
The takeaway message here is to be nimble; be agile with a small ‘a’. As a transformative, disruptive program evolves, the way you manage change might have to as well. Integrate change management processes into business processes and you’ll find that a flexible approach will give you a better longer-term result.
PMOs make the active choice to embark on a journey to use a new project management software tool or take on a large-scale change like moving to earned value for performance monitoring – and these aren’t easy choices. They involve disruption and investment. It’s important to get a good return for that commitment. Embracing flexible change management practices is one way to ensure that you bring the team along with you, even if you aren’t quite sure where you’re going when you take the first step.